Download Youtube for XBOX 360 and Zune
December 19, 2007 – 4:27 pmThere are a lot of good videos on Youtube that you just can’t buy anywhere. If you are looking for a way to play those videos via your XBOX 360 console or on your Zune, I have some suggestions and information that might help.
As a huge Youtube fan, I was recently wondering if I could play Youtube videos via my XBOX 360 console. More importantly would there be a way to take them with me on a Zune?
I found there were a lot of ways to do it, however taking the free or open source path usually lead to an incompatible video that the XBOX/Zune would not play. To sucessfully get these videos there is a two step process:
1. Downloading the video. Youtube and other video sites store and stream videos in flash (.flv) format. The first step is to save the .flv video to your computer. There are web sites that will assist you with this part and require ZERO software installation. One such site is Video Downloader 2.0 and is completely free to use. The tool allows you to download the .flv file onto your local PC. All you need is a flash video player to play the file.
2. Converting the video. After you have successfully downloaded the flash video file from Youtube, you have to convert it into a format that the XBOX and Zune will recognize. The desired format for both is WMV (Windows Media Video). There are tons of freeware applications out there that will convert flash files to wmv, avi, etc, however none of them worked well for me. Another important note is that the XBOX 360 (and I think Zune too) will only play WMV versions 7, 8, and 9 so your converter software needs to be able to create WMV v7 v8 or v9 too.
After trying out several freeware converters, I eventually gave up. I was able to successfully convert a flash video into a WMV but the WMV couldn’t be played by the XBOX because it was an older version.
A few more searches led me to the Moyea FLV Video Converter. This software costs around $25 but will consolidate everything into 1 simple step. You type in the Youtube URL, it gets the .flv file, and then automatically converts it to a WMV that is playable on Zune, XBOX 360, and even IPOD. Not only that but it will allow you to download videos from Youtube, Google, Myspace, and Yahoo to name a few.
For me it has been a great investment and gets rid of all the headaches involved with trying to use different sites and software to accomplish one goal. I download videos onto a shared folder on my Windows Vista PC, then stream them via my XBOX or you can sync them to a Zune too.
If you are wondering how to setup sharing for your videos on an XBOX, check out my previous article on media sharing.